The Chaos Crystal Read Online Free Page A

thing,' Taryx remarked loudly after a time, almost as if he had heard Declan's unspoken question.
    'What?' Arryl asked in confusion. 'The Crasii?'
    Taryx shook his head. 'I mean the Tide coming in. Thing's ... happen . .. when the Tide comes in this fast.'
    Declan was afraid to ask what that meant. But he asked anyway, keenly feeling his ignorance about all things magical. 'What things?'
    'Things too horrible to mention,' Kentravyon called in a rather dramatic tone. Tempting fate, he sat on the edge of the cliff a few feet away, his legs dangling over the rim as if he didn't have a care in the world.
    'What things?' Declan repeated impatiently, more than a little fed up with these immortals and their cryptic responses to perfectly reasonable questions. Why does immortality make things worse, rather than better? he wondered. Why does it seem to bring only cynicism and narcissism? Why all the sarcasm? Why doesn't it bring enlightenment? Or detachment from the material world? Some sort of universal awareness not available to mortal man?
    Tides, will I be like them in a few hundred — a few thousand — years?
    A dark-haired, unremarkable looking man, Kentravyon was carving something from a chunk of ice he'd picked up on the way here, unconcerned, it seemed, about the imminent danger he was in if the ice beneath him crumbled into the ocean. Declan could feel him using the Tide to carve his statue, rather than more traditional tools, and from where he stood, it seemed to be taking shape as the head of a human.
    'Things ...' Kentravyon said with a shrug. 'Cold places get colder, hot places get hotter ... the rains move and deserts with them. Islands sink, mountains
    move, other lands arise ...' As he spoke, little chips of ice flew randomly off his sculpture, hitting the other Tide Lords standing nearby, eventually prompting Arryl to ask what he was doing. She didn't seem surprised to hear about the effect of the rising Tide. But then, this wasn't the first time she had experienced one, so it wasn't the novelty for her that it was for Declan — if novelty was a word one could use to describe the potential disruption and perhaps destruction of all human settlement on Amyrantha.
    "What are you doing?" Arryl asked.
    'Creating the face of God,' Kentravyon told her, yelling to stop the wind snatching away his words.
    'How do you know it's the face of God?'
    Kentravyon shrugged. '1 just get rid of all the bits that don't look like me.'
    That remarked evoked a sour laugh from Taryx who addressed the other two loudly to be heard over the wind, saying, 'And to think, I thought being mad meant being inconsistent.'
    Kentravyon tossed the ice carving aside and climbed to his feet, turning to face the immortal who'd dared to insult him. 'I am not mad. It is the rest of you who are misguided.'
    'I don't think I'm God,' Taryx said.
    Not yet, Declan thought, wondering if Kentravyon's delusions were the eventual fate of all immortals and one of the reasons Cayal was so anxious to die. Unbidden, another doubt crept into his mind. Will I think the same way someday? The notion scared him a little. Will I one day find myself sitting on the edge of a disintegrating glacier, whittling away my time, thinking I'm omnipotent? Declan glanced westward, to the ice-cliff some distance away, where a lone figure stood silhouetted against the overcast sky, his cloak billowing out in the harsh wind coming off the ocean until it was almost horizontal. Kentravyon noticed the direction of Declan's gaze and smiled.
    'You don't want to die, either, I hope,' Kentravyon said, peering at him curiously. 'No.'
    'Cayal wants it so bad he can taste it. I rather think that makes him the crazy one, not me.'
    Declan tore his gaze from Cayal's lonely silhouette to look at Kentravyon. 'We're not allowing for the possibility that you're both lunatics, then?'
    'You will come to accept the wisdom of my truth eventually,' Kentravyon told him, with the sage air of someone who knew